Tracy (1995 p. 19) emphasises in his book that in the twenty-first century tomorrow will be
more different from today than in the past. Therefore today's corporations get to stay
innovative reinvent themselves continuously and have to design new business. In contrast to
that software mastery becomes more than ever the key factor for business success (Northrop
2008 p. 12). In the twenty-first century software pervades every sector and has become the
bottom line for many organisations. Therefore reusability plays a growing role for every
business in today's rapid changing world (Strahringer 2003 p. 5). Thus new paradigms in
software engineering are focusing on the reutilisation and modularisation of software
solutions. One innovative and growing concept since 2003 is software line development which has
its origin in the automotive and fashion industry (Strahringer 2003 p. 5). The key benefit of
software line development is the covering of a wide field of application with minimal extra
costs by reuse of a common software platform. In reference to Ebert & Smouts (2003 p. 29) the
most publications in the field of software lines deal with configuration and change management.
Whereas the integration of software line development into enterprises' product portfolios has
been till now widely neglected. In contrast to that Jeffery & Leliveld (2004) points out that
the failure or success of software lines highly depends in particular on their level of
integration into companies' product portfolio system. For this reason the major goal of this
research is the realisation of an integrated portfolio management system for software line
development. This covers at first the determination of the role portfolio management in
organisational governance. Thereafter the general elements of a portfolio management system
will be identified. On the other side the specific demands of software line engineering
according to the portfolio elements will be analysed. The insights of the analysis build the
basis for the design of the software product line portfolio management system. The design
describes the portfolio management system from different architectural perspectives which
represent the viewpoint of the diverse stakeholders. Moreover different analysis methods will
be evaluated with a respective scoring model for the software line product domain and asset
application domain. At the end the scientific work gives a suggestion for further
investigations in the scope of software line portfolio management.
